In search of...

I pretty much have three choices when it comes to midwives, and I've met with two of them so far. The first one seemed competent, but nothing really struck me as special about her. The second one, the most likely choice, was pretty amazing. She is a self-identified hippie granola crunch-meister, but, as Jess rightly pointed out, if you ever wanted a hippie to handle something, it's this sort of thing. Because, really, it's all about compassion and empathy -- what doctors seem to lack -- and the understanding that childbirth is a holistic experience, not just a medical one. This particular midwife oozed with not only the necessary level of emotional competence, but was also an EMT professionally. I haven't yet met with the third one, but she was a student of a nationally renowned midwife and is friends with the doula I would like to use.

While I'm on this kick, I should probably talk a little bit about where my desire for a home birth came from and what I hope to gain from it... as well as what precautions we will have in place if something unexpected arises.

In college, I had a professor whose wife had had two home births because they had been inspired by their experiences with Mayan women's birth practices. (My course was on Mayan Culture, and my professor talked a lot about his own personal experience visiting with Mayan villages.) Obviously, in the mountaintop forests of Guatemala, there aren't a lot of medical resources, but it's not considered a hindrance when it comes to babies: they have a longstanding tradition of community birthing practices, where women who have experienced labor and attended many of their neighbor's births sit with the laboring woman and assist in their delivery. The group of women work together to guide and help the new baby be born, and having seen and experienced as many as hundreds of births over the course of their own lives, the village elder women are very versed in what helps the process and what extra measures should be taken if something unusual arises. Medical intervention doesn't really exist in any substantive way, and very rarely would it ever be necessary.

Our culture has come to view pregnancy and labor and delivery as having a medical condition that leads to a medical trauma that needs to be "treated"... But as with any other living creature, childbirth is not only a completely natural phenomenon, it is, really, the only true biological purpose for our existence. How is it possible, then, that our society views something so perfectly designed and perfectly normal as something terrifying or disastrous?

I guess the real kicker is that I'm not afraid. I'm really not. Fear of childbirth is precisely what makes it dangerous and uncontrollable. Without the presence of that fear, I will be able to approach my baby's birth as something remarkable, miraculous, and a tremendous feat of my own natural strength and ability. Which, I think, every woman should carry with her -- a mark of her evolutionary success and a personal triumph to share with every other woman who has ever existed.

That said, I do understand that I am really, truly, in the minority here... and that most women that are my contemporaries would consider my sentiments absolute madness. And that's okay: I completely understand women who want to be assured that medical facilities are close at hand and would never imagine passing up the opportunity to utilize everything that modern technology and medicine has to offer.

However, I'd like to make it clear that I am not eschewing all medical intervention either: licensed midwives are particularly good at knowing their limits. If there is any question about the safety of either me or the baby, they will call for an immediate transfer to the hospital where medical procedures can take over. What I appreciate about this approach over the typical hospital birth is that I will be assured that all possible natural alternatives will have been exhausted before dangerous medicinal or surgical procedures will be implemented. Not only that, but all of the most common problems that arise can be taken care of through medical intervention by the midwives themselves, including IV fluids, pitocin following delivery to contract the uterus, anti-hemorrhage medication, oxygen masks, infant resuscitation, emergency episiotomy, numbing for stitches, stitching, and... lots of other things.

I don't want to mistrust hospitals, doctors, or nurses as much as I tend to, but... I have seen and heard too much evidence of these medical professionals simply "following protocol" over really caring for each patient individually. Which means administering pitocin (artificial labor hormones) when it is not medically necessary, which leads to stronger more painful contractions, which leads to pain medication or an epidural, which cause fetal distress/decreased heart rate, which leads to emergency Cesarean... And then you have major abdominal surgery which must be repeated for every subsequent child you have... All brought on because the doctor didn't think your labor was moving along quite fast enough and you should have a little help with some pitocin that wasn't really necessary in the first place.

Of course they won't tell you that was really what happened, either. And most women don't think to make certain that the medications they are receiving are totally necessary, because they're already strapped to a bed with an IV in their arm, and they've entrusted their well-being to the "professionals". Unfortunately, OB's are professional surgeons more than anything these days... Women plan C-Sections so that they don't have to deal with labor in a normal way, because they're afraid of the pain, because their doctors agree it's easier. I don't know any woman, personally, who's given birth recently without either an epidural or by C-Section. (Except for Jess... and she was in the Mayan Culture class with me...)

So, for me personally, I am happy to leave my gynecological health to my OB-GYN, but in terms of childbirth, in terms of those pivotal 24-36 hours of my life, a midwife is the only way to go.